Overview
The different narrations of the beginnings of Performance Art, a translocal movement, will be the focus of this conference. Leading international scholars will first investigate the strategies with which museums, galleries, but also historians and theorists and artists of the genre, have reconstructed and represented, from different perspectives, the beginnings of this important field of art and activism, determining the forms of its subsequent transmission and reception. Another focus will be laid on collaborative strategies and networking labour, e.g. between curator and performer, mediator and performer, researcher and performer; friends and performer. The crucial question here is: how can we tell the histories without erasing important parts, like feminist, queer and activist positions? How can we avoid to write “canons” of single artist’s bourgeois position coined by hegemonic structures? If we understand Performance Art as a tool to protest against power-structures and conceive it as a social mean to get into contact with a broad audience outside the informed art circles we have to analyze its situatedness, contexts and conditions (see Osip Brik 1918). To do so we will ask: which different methodologies for researching the beginnings are applied (oral history, cross-mappings, collective remembrance workshops, expert interviews e.g.) and what are the ontological axioms therein?
